Forty years ago I visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I was on a trip with the British Army and had travelled in convoy on large motorised 175-mm guns with the 5th Heavy Regiment from its base at Hildesheim for Nato exercises on Luneberg Heath.

Until then, the trip had been a bit of a lark.

The camp at Hildesheim had been a Luftwaffe base and the walls of what had been the pilots mess were still decorated with hand painted murals and hung with memorabilia.

The ride on a big gun – the biggest in the Nato armoury at that time – was slow but exhilarating along the rural roads of Lower Saxony. Civilians stopped to watch, children waved.

A night exercise was staged and another journalist and I left base camp in a Land Rover with a driver and map reading corporal to find the troops.

Unfortunately, in a black-out, all tracks in a forest look the same. We abandoned the vehicle and the corporal led us through the woods by compass until we broke into the open.

”We should hurry,” he said. “The barrage will be starting soon.”

Across a field, the moon hidden by clouds, dark shadows of a tree line ahead, and we were unexpectedly challenged. We had been walking directly into the face of the camouflaged guns.

A few minutes later,they opened up, roaring into the night, the ground shaking beneath our feet.

I was the only one without ear protectors so I experienced the full shock and awe and was thankful the barrage hadn’t started whilst we were in front of the guns rather than behind them.

The hospitality of this boy’s own adventure had been wonderful. One officer seemed to be able to find us wherever we were on the Heath or in the forest.

He would drive up, flip back the tarpaulin on the back of his vehicle and reveal an alcoholic choice better than a high street pub. The Amstel lager was particularly satisfying.

Mass grave of 2,500 bodies at Belsen

In the morning, a junior officer offered to take me to Bergen-Belsen.

I hadn’t realised it was so close.

“They say the birds don’t sing at Belsen,” he said.

It seemed an appropriate myth.

We drove through the delightful village of Belsen on a road through a forest that was long and straight and recalled black and white newsreels of prisoners trekking their way to captivity.

The lark had suddenly become serious.

The former camp had not been fully developed as a visitor centre back in the 1970s, although there was an exhibition hall, a curved wall of countless names of the dead and a tall memorial.

The only other visitors were a handful of Nato soldiers. I absorbed the cold facts.

Belsen had been a concentration camp where inmates died of starvation and disease. In the early years of the war, it was estimated 20,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war died there.

From 1943 it was used to confine homosexuals, anti-Nazi Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and Jews.

As the war went bad in the East, other camps were evacuated and inmates moved to Belsen.

Jews from all over Europe ended up within its barbed wire fences.

The camp had been designed to hold 10,000. By April, 1945, it held 60,000.

When men of the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army drove through its gates, 70 years ago tomorrow, they were confronted by 10,000 unburied corpses.The survivors were in such poor condition that 14,000 died afterliberation.

It’s estimated 50,000 died at Belsen, including Anne Frank, who’s moving diary showed one aspect of life beneath the jackboot.

Anne Frank

Belsen showed another. To quote one of the liberators: “Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.”

The camp was leveled by the British Army.

All that were left were the huge mounds of mass graves, marked by stone inscriptions that tell how many bodies each contain, and small markers with the names of families to personalise the loss.

I spent an hour walking the paths alone, submerged by the enormity of what had happened; attempting to imagine myself and my family consigned to such a fate simply because we had held the wrong beliefs.

This was a place that still retained its mantle of horror. While I was kneeling by one of the mounds beneath a war grey sky, I realised the officer was right: no birds sang at Belsen.

The only sounds were from the distant guns on Luneburg Heath; a phantom battle still being fought in memory of the dead.

Belsen, 70 years on, remains a potent reminder of the evils of extreme ideologies.

Tragically, such ideologies continue to manifest themselves around the world.

Will humanity never learn?